The present invention relates to paint rollers and particularly to a paint roller sleeve assembly that is easily cleaned and therefore can be reused economically.
Paint rollers have been known for decades and are particularly useful for applying water based paints, saving time in application of paint and allowing large surfaces to be painted quickly and easily with a uniform coat.
Typically, paint rollers comprise two major components, a handle assembly and a roller sleeve removably mounted on the handle assembly and that carries and applies paint during use of the paint roller.
The handle assembly typically consists of a grip and an L-shaped metal frame extending from the grip and supporting a rotatable support for a paint roller sleeve.
A paint roller sleeve includes a thin-walled hollow cylindrical core that fits on the rotatable support portion of the handle assembly, and a fabric cover carried on the core and used to carry and apply paint to a surface. The core is typically of either cardboard or plastic material, depending upon the quality of the paint roller. The fabric cover is typically applied as a strip of fabric wound helically onto the outer surface of the core and bonded to it, for example by an adhesive material.
Typically the fabric of the cover is a dense knitted pile fabric that may be knitted from natural fibers such as wool or mohair, synthetic fibers such as polyester, acrylic, nylon, or rayon, or from a blend of natural and synthetic fibers. A knitted fabric backing with a knitted-in pile is ordinarily used. The backing is typically made of synthetic yarns, with the pile being made of a desired natural or synthetic fiber, or a blend of different fibers. The knitted pile fabric is typically coated on the non-pile side with a stabilizing coating composition and the backing is then typically processed by heat treatment to produce a dimensionally stabilized knitted pile fabric.
A paint roller cover manufacturer typically manufactures a paint roller sleeve by wrapping a narrow strip of pile fabric in a helical fashion around a hollow cylindrical core made of cardboard or plastic material, fastening the backing of the pile fabric by an adhesive or by thermally bonding it to the surface of a core.
Such paint roller sleeves are made with a standard interior size of the core, so that the sleeves can be used on a standard handle assembly, from which they can be removed easily for cleaning or replacement. While such a paint roller sleeve including a core can be cleaned, the process is time-consuming and inefficient, even when the roller has been used for water-based paint. Cleaning a sleeve with a cardboard core may result in the deterioration of the core. For people doing their own painting projects the cost of replacing a high quality roller sleeve may be enough of an incentive to clean a paint roller sleeve for reuse, or to refrigerate a used roller sleeve overnight in an airtight package for reuse in the near future. For professional painting, however, it is common to discard a used paint roller sleeve rather than to clean it or otherwise preserve it for reuse at a later time, since the labor cost for cleaning a used roller sleeve, together with the cost of needed water or paint brush cleaner and other solvents, and buckets or other equipment needed to clean a paint roller cover, far outweigh the cost of replacing a used roller sleeve.
As a result, many otherwise perfectly good paint rollers are discarded rather than being cleaned and reused, and the discarded paint roller sleeves become a part of the accumulating waste materials in landfills.
Even when paint roller sleeves are washed carefully, some paint residue is likely to remain and drain to leave a paint ring where a paint roller cover has been left standing on end to dry, or to accumulate at the ends of the fibers of the pile and result in visible differences in the coat of paint applied the next time the roller is used.
What is needed, then, is a paint roller sleeve that can be cleaned for reuse economically enough to justify the cost of producing such a paint roller sleeve with a high-quality pile that can result in an efficient and high-quality application of a coat of paint using such a roller sleeve and thus justify reuse of the sleeve rather than having it prematurely discarded.